Chapter 5 - The Vanishing at Spruce Island
The old iron wharf at Spruce Island was six miles north of the city, located at the end of a gravel lane that had been blocked by three tiers of rusted oil drums and a sign that said Property of Carter Marine — Restricted Assets. The wood of the pier was black, rotten from forty years of salt immersion, its pilings leaning toward the eastern channel like the ribs of an old wreck left on the flats.
Michael Anders stopped the station wagon near the edge of the granite bulkhead at seven-fifteen the next morning. The fog was so thick that the water of the channel was invisible, its presence marked only by the heavy, low-frequency slap of the swells against the timber beams and the cold, greasy smell of dead kelp left by the tide.
The rear door of the station wagon was open, the navy blankets lying in a disordered heap on the linoleum floorboards. In the center of the front seat sat the small, black walnut recipe box that Ellie had carried out of the Cape Elizabeth kitchen—the one that had belonged to Andrew’s father.
Inside the box, beneath a recipe card for Sourdough biscuit metrics (November 2022), lay a small, folded piece of white church bulletin paper. Written in Ellie’s compact, kitchen-clerk script was a single line:
Michael: Margaret’s men came to the hospital wing through the service elevator at six. They had the custody warrant from the Cumberland court. I took the girls through the lower laundry lane before the signatures could be served. Don't look for us at the clinic. The yellow cottage is gone, but the wrens are still on the window frame.
He stood on the wet granite of the bulkhead, his canvas jacket soaked through by the mist, his pale grey eyes tracking the long, vertical shape of a small harbor tug that was moving slowly through the fog toward the outer islands.
He did not call the harbor marshal. He did not return to his suite at the harbor hotel. He sat on the rough wood of an old oak timber piling, pulled his father’s mechanical tide gauge from his pocket, and began to log the hourly movement of the water against the Spruce Island granite.
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He knew the girls would have to cross the channel before the winter freeze. He knew the yellow paint on the cottage window frame had been covered by two layers of white latex by the new owners, but he also knew that when a man spends twenty-eight years waiting for a terrified woman to rise from her knees, he learns how to read the small, grey changes in the tide until the original signatures finally clear the line.
Behind him, through the white wall of the fog, the iron gates of the container terminal began to swing shut for the morning shift, their rusted hinges making a long, screaming sound that expanded across the dark water like the voice of an old vessel entering the breakwater for the last time.
